Electronic sports (“e-sports”), also known as competitive video gaming, has grown in popularity due in large part to the explosive growth of online video games and availability of network connectivity. Along with the popularity of e-sports, demand for live streaming or pre-stored replays of video gameplay sessions has grown. Although storage and network technology has advanced in recent years to accommodate large scale data storage and transferring, the load on storage and network infrastructure imposed by live streaming and pre-stored playback of video gameplay sessions can be quite large, potentially causing delays and dissatisfaction for end users and maintenance problems for system administrators. This is because conventional methods of providing such playback typically involves recording gameplay as media files. These media files become very large, thanks in large part to modern high definition, graphics-intense, video games.
Furthermore, even casual gamers are increasingly sharing their gameplay through social networks. Again, such sharing is typically performed by recording gameplay as a media file. A further limitation of conventional systems is the limited manner in which users can provide commentary on other users' gameplay, search for video game playback and commentary, and obtain localized content relating to video game playback.
These and other problems exist with annotating and sharing video game playback.